"A blog is to a writer what a canvas is to an artist." ~ Colleen Redman

Archive for the ‘Writer’ Category

-The following 2017 review was done by excerpting the first line or few in one post from each month last year. You can click on the name of the month for a full accounting. January – This morning the moon glowed like a spotlight in a theater of sky. It appeared like a trick that […]

-This review of my poetry collection, along with a small selection of my poems from the book, is in the current issue of Floyd County Moonshine, which features one of my photographs on the cover. Colleen Redman’s new chapbook from Finishing Line Press, Packing a Suitcase for the Afterlife, is an intriguing collection. The […]

We put on a good show. Maybe we should take it on the road, or at least do a couple of more local readings. Chelsea Adams and I were featured poets on Sunday at the New River Community College in Dublin, a presentation of the NRCC Library. In was a coffee house setting. After our […]

No, this is not a picture of Jack Daniels but it is of Jack and Daniel. Jack is the co-founder of The Little River Poetry Festival and Daniel (on the 4-wheeler) is the owner of Floyd’s On the Water Kayaking and Canoeing where the festival took place over the weekend. Look for a story about the […]

There’s a lot of traveling in Packing a Suitcase for the Afterlife, my poetry collection being published by Finishing Line Press, whether it’s back-and-forth between the past and the present, between growing up on the coast of Massachusetts and writing poetry in my kitchen in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, or between the rich […]

That’s a picture of me packing a suitcase for the afterlife, sorting a few years of poetry into a collection, one that reads like a memoir, explores the weight of loss, rummages through my childhood closet and is informed by dreams. I’m picking and choosing what fits and distilling the rest to its essence. Poet […]

Packing a Suitcase for the Afterlife is a poetry memoir by Colleen Redman that is being published by Finishing Line Press (FLP), an award winning small press out of Georgetown, Kentucky. Redman writes and provides photography for The Floyd Press newspaper in Floyd, Virginia, and other regional publications. Her poetry has been published nationally, regionally, […]

My poetry memoir, Packing a Suitcase for the Afterlife, has been accepted for publication by Finishing Line Press (FLP), an award winning small press out of Georgetown, Kentucky. The 32 poem collection probes the questions: ‘How much does the essence of one’s psyche weigh? Is the soul the one carry-on that we can actually take […]

Haley Leopold, a Language Arts teacher at Springhouse Community School, recently posted a question on the Floyd Group’s Facebook page. She was looking for someone to talk to her class about spoken word, poetry readings and slams, someone who knows something about writing the kind of poetry that asks ‘Who am I’ and ‘Who am […]

Having The Sun magazine around is like having a bottle of wine in the fridge. If it’s there, I’m easily tempted to drink it, even before noon, and even though I know it will make me feel fuzzy. I don’t keep The Sun around because reading it makes me want to write. I don’t have […]

– The following are answers to questions from a writer’s blog hop that I was invited to participate in by Polly Brown from A Year to Think it Over. What am I writing/working on now? I recently finished a feature on a woman who hiked the Camino, a 500 mile pilgrimage through Spain and […]

First there was the new Artemis poetry reading launch, hosted by two Floyd editors and featuring the legendary Nikki Giovanni (which I wrote about HERE), and then, a week later, Floyd County Moonshine contributors read at the Floyd library. Between these two fine literary/art publications and the two reading events, along with the fact that […]

I’ll be reading with others at the local library with other Moonshine contributors on Thursday. Below is the editor’s press release. Above is a photo I took that was chosen for the latest cover. Author Casey Clabough and other local literary talents of Floyd and the New River Valley will gather at 7:00 p.m. on […]

Nikki Giovanni has style, not only as a poet and in the way she conducts herself, but in her appearance. In this case, as the guest of honor at the re-launching of the literary art journal Artemis, it was from head to toe. She was sporting some stylish cornrows and shiny blue shoes. I didn’t […]

When I’m searching for something to blog about and I’m feeling uninspired, I’m like a doctor with a hammer trying to get a reflex. When I finally land on an idea that has some kick to it, I know I’ve hit the right one. ~ Colleen When I first started writing I didn’t know that […]

No spit balls were thrown. No one giggled or whispered. The students actually listened and seemed interested in hearing my writer’s story. It was a small Literary Art Project class at the new Blue Mountain High School, where the students (currently six girls) are re-launching Artemis, a Roanoke literary arts journal that was founded in […]

I save old pieces of poems the way a junkyard owner saves old cars for parts. It makes sense that poets recycle, since poetry is a form of conservation, a shorthand of language. Writers use everything around them. They draw from what they know, and conserve their words to make their writing more efficient. We […]

About

From the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia I write to synthesize what I'm learning at the time, whether it be poetry, a political commentary, or a letter to my mother in Hull, Massachusetts, where I'm originally from. Whenever I don't know exactly what it is I'm doing and it borders on wasting my time, I call it research. 'Dear Abby, How can I get rid of freckles?' was my first published piece at the age of 11.